December 07, 2009

Remember the Formalists? If you do, you're probably wrong.

Somewhere on the Internet, someone has quoted D.H. Lawrence as saying, "If you want to get over a woman, fictionalize her." At least that's what I remember. It's good advice. At a party recently, I wound up standing by the food table with another divorced male in his 50's who was trying to get over not just A Woman, but The Women of Our Generation. That group is a fiction, though for college-educated Western men who survived the 70's, it's a pretty darned familiar one. I think it's time we all started fictionalizing more assertively.

This post is the seed for an upcoming series on the tremendous value of fictionalization, falsified memory, and using the wrong data.

On fictionalization: The Russian Formalists argued that the biography of an artist was irrelevant to the value of what he produced. Spend time with the thing itself (hence "form"alism), they argued, and you'll get more from it than from any study of the author's life. They also claimed that the direct experience of a coherent work of art transformed the person who consumed it. The artwork necessarily "made strange" whatever it represented, often by making the medium itself (like language, or paint, or cardboard) leap forward to the senses and sensibilities that apprehended it.

Examples: When Shakespeare writes, "Th'expense of spirit in a waste of shame / Is lust in action," all the hissing sounds jump out at us, almost before we sense what the words themselves mean, or what the moral of the lines might be. And it's fitting because the hissing sound wakes up the topic for us, breathy and serpentine and lusty. When a sculptor creates flowing robes in marble, we're confused for a minute, because we know it's stone, but it flows like fabric. And we grow aware, as one of the Formalists wrote, of "what makes the stone stony."

When we "grow aware," we grow more powerful, because we seize reality again, and our senses, sharpened, help us to move ahead with conviction and to succeed in a real world.

This "making-strange," as the Russians called it, broke away the "glassy armor of familiarity" that automates daily perceptions, and thanks to art, people regain access to the truth of possibilities, or, at least, to the possibility of a truth.

All this free-thinking happened in the early days of the Russian Revolution. It got crushed as the Soviets started to think it was decadent, and a throwback to "art for art's sake," which was Bad For People.

But it persists in memory, and is now maybe more valuable than ever for people interested in thriving in a culture built of information and memory. That's where fictionalization comes in.

Fictionalization is the making-strange of lived experience (that's the medium for a storyteller): it renders one person's experience into a "not-true-but-true" form that can be seized and processed by another one, for some purpose to be determined. According to psychologists like Daniel Gilbert of Harvard University, author of "Stumbling on Happiness" and lots of other research reports on human expectation (he calls this "affective forecasting"), falsified memory works in much the same way that novelists do.

Each of us (and by extension, an enterprise made up of groupthinking individuals) predicts a future by spinning up in our collected neurons the possible worlds of failure or success that might be. We head in that direction guided by this GPS-like picture of where we are. Then, once we get there, we look around, and, looking back, we find those same people (i.e. ourselves) who predicted how it would all be, kind of strange and foolish, for having left out all the important details that actually matter now that we're here.

Of course we can require that the future match our forecast, and correspond to our data about the past, which we used to forecast the future. As my many divorced friends will attest, this almost never works. And as a famous economist is also quoted as having said, "The only value of economic forecasting is to build respect for astrology."

And so it is with using the wrong data. For a long time the Information Quality world has insisted on teaching enterprises to produce the RIGHT data: accurate, timely, coherent, relevant, complete. But clearly the financial world, well equipped with the RIGHT data, ignored the broader sweep of probabilities and possibilities, because (using affective forecasting) they decided that the data they were using were the data that mattered for the future they wished for--and ignored the other possibilities.

Now that we are trying to clean up their mess, I would like to advocate for a Formalist approach to information quality: deliberately, artistically, use the wrong data in your risk models and your CAD systems and your accounting. Set up labs for possible worlds with the wrong data (and there are so very many ways for data to be wrong), and ask your analysts to waste some time in these fictionalized worlds. Encourage them to falsify memory. From this diversion into fictionalized worlds, you will discover ways to open up innovation, to "make strange" the assumptions we are making today, and to uncover insights that only used to be available to artists.

Comments

And words from one of my favorite Wallace Stevens poems (“The Idea of Order at Key West”):

“It was her voice that made
The sky acutest at its vanishing.
She measured to the hour its solitude.
She was the single artificer of the world
In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea,
Whatever self it had, became the self
That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we,
As we beheld her striding there alone,
Knew that there never was a world for her
Except the one she sang and, singing, made.”

I am looking forward to your upcoming series on an upcoming series on the tremendous value of fictionalization, falsified memory, and using the wrong data.

For those who argue against this particular approach to information quality, I offer the words of Stephen Denning from his 2001 book, “The Springboard: How Storytelling Ignites Action in Knowledge Era Organizations”:

“Storytelling doesn’t replace analytical thinking. It supplements it by enabling us to imagine new perspectives and new worlds. Abstract analysis is easier to understand when seen through the lens of a well-chosen story.”